Author, journalist, storyteller, music opinionator

Menu

Tag Archives: Mark Kemp

TweetManchester is 185 railroad miles north of London, linked by signposts that read Rugby, Birmingham, and Stoke-on-Trent; by sprawling misty green meadows, gushing streams, and a zillion grazing sheep. The city itself is a soot-gray mosaic of European architecture, from the high Victorian gothic of its majestic town hall to the palazzo warehouses that color…

Tweet “Ah, baby, you’re so vicious…” Reading on Facebook today that Lou Reed had died, I had one of those visceral reactions. I literally felt it in my gut. It was as though someone had punched me. Hard. With a flower. Lou Reed was too tough to die. He was too gentle to die. He…

TweetThose words come from the late Phil Walden, one-time manager of the southern soul singer Otis Redding and southern blues-rock band The Allman Brothers. It was an unexpected observation Walden made to me about the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. during an interview a decade ago for my book, Dixie Lullaby: A Story of Music,…

TweetI once saw misogyny under every rock. I was in my early thirties and Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore had offhandedly described a new movement of all-female punk bands — L7, Babes in Toyland, Bikini Kill — as “foxcore.” I wrote a scathing editor’s note for Option in response to it, suggesting he was being misogynistic. Boy,…

Tweet“Is there a problem, officer?” “Damn straight, it’s called race.” — Mos Def, “Mr. Nigga” I can’t shake my despair over the Trayvon Martin verdict. It’s not that I was surprised by it. After all, shootings and killings of young black men happen all the time in America, and cases similar to the Trayvon Martin…

TweetOver the past three days, I’ve been asked numerous times how I feel, as a former Rolling Stone editor, about the magazine’s latest cover featuring Boston bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. My first thought upon seeing the image — with the cover line, “THE BOMBER: How a popular, promising student was failed by his family, fell into radical Islam…